It’s the most important number you’ve never heard of, and President Joe Biden is about to change it as he resets U.S. environmental policy.

Dominion Voting Systems is suing Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, for libel, citing Giuliani’s false claims that the company was part of a conspiracy to steal the presidential election. The case isn’t a slam dunk, mostly because of First Amendment protections that make it hard to prove libel where public figures are concerned. But the suit is strong enough that Giuliani should hire a good lawyer — which is to say, a better one than Rudy Giuliani.

The Postal Service delivers mail to our homes practically every day. Why couldn’t government also bring us vaccinations?

President Joe Biden has let it be known that he will retain Christopher A. Wray, one of President Donald Trump’s appointees, as director of the FBI. It’s a wise decision.

Once again, the COVID-19 health message is getting muddled. Even as officials and scientists urge the public to get vaccinated, they warn that after vaccination, we’ll still have to go on isolating and wearing masks.

President Joe Biden has proposed a nationwide $15 minimum wage as part of his so-called “American Rescue Plan.” Talk about bad timing: Raising labor prices on businesses that are struggling to stay afloat is like throwing them a load of bricks instead of a life preserver.

More than 1,000 law enforcement officers swept through Hong Kong on Jan. 6, arresting 53 residents under Beijing’s new national security law. Those detained could face up to life in prison for the “subversive” act of holding a primary vote in 2019 for legislative elections that were later postponed.

We hesitate to add yet another voice to the chorus of criticism for COVID vaccine distribution, but as a longtime primary care pediatric practice, we feel the need to speak out and offer our services. We were struck over the past few days by the comments from politicians lamenting the fact that the COVID vaccine rollout has been “as incomprehensible as it has been inexcusable.” We agree, as we are even today still working to find vaccine to protect our front-line clinical staff.

When he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden knew if he won the election, he would be facing enormous challenges: curbing a deadly pandemic, reviving a struggling economy, alleviating the hardship of jobless workers, combating racial injustice and restoring the world’s trust in American leadership. “History,” he said, “has delivered us to one of the most difficult moments America has ever faced.”

On Jan. 22, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will enter into force. The treaty bans the development, production, possession, deployment, testing, use and just about anything else you can imagine related to nuclear weapons.

President Donald Trump leaves office in less than a week. What we need in those days, and beyond, is not more drama.

This year’s celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day comes less than two weeks after a violent white mob, inspired by entrenched racism and dressed up in Christian symbolism, attacked American democracy, leaving five people dead.

Endurance.

Watchdog groups have long been barking for ethics changes on Capitol Hill. Rightly so.

The emergence in the U.K. of a new and more infectious variant of the COVID-19 virus sharpens an important “contrast and compare” health analysis between that country and the U.S. It sheds important new light on the immediate challenge the administration of President-elect Joe Biden will need to overcome if it is to have any realistic prospect of quelling the public health crisis by the middle of the year and of restoring inclusive and sustainable economic dynamism to the U.S. economy. It will also inform the continuing debate about what the deplorable mob attack on Congress on Wednesday means for the future of the U.S.

I still don’t really know how to make sense of the events of Jan. 6. Instead of one interpretation, I see three different ways of thinking about what happened, and which probably need to be combined for full understanding. I’m not ready to do that combining right now, so instead I’ll give you the three perspectives.

Facebook Inc. is taking one of President Donald Trump’s biggest megaphones away, possibly for good.

President-elect Joe Biden will soon assume responsibility for filling some of the most coveted jobs in government: foreign ambassadorships. President Donald Trump put political loyalists rather than trained diplomats into a record number of these positions. To restore professionalism to American foreign policy, the new administration should reverse that trend.

Ph.D. programs in the U.S. are in for some big changes. Humanities and social science fields probably produce too many Ph.D.s and will need to cut back. But a big expansion of government-funded research could prevent a similar fate from befalling STEM Ph.D.s.

After four years of a president who regarded the attorney general as his personal lawyer, it was vital that President-elect Joe Biden choose a head of the Justice Department whose independence and professionalism would be beyond dispute. Biden has risen to that challenge with his choice of U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Merrick B. Garland for that position.